Biplanes & Nanofactories

Lord Kelvin's famous pronouncement, "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible," made in 1895 while he was president of Britain's Royal Society, has become cliche for advocates of new technologies. We sometimes use it ourselves when answering those who are skeptical about molecular manufacturing.

Of course, many -- if not most -- new technologies touted as "revolutionary" fail to live up to the hype. It's understandable why someone today would doubt CRN's claims that advanced nanotechnology will bring transformative and disruptive impacts to society within the next decade or two.

It's equally understandable that many 19th century scientists and engineers were doubtful about the possibility of flight. And yet, less than ten years after Lord Kelvin's unfortunate statement, the Wright brothers took to the air. The rest, as they say, is history...

But that's not the whole story. Take yourself back to the 1920's, when biplanes were "state of the art" and jet engines had not yet been conceived. Looking at the future of flight from that point, no one could have expected that before long humans would fly faster than the speed of sound, and soon after, giant airliners would carry hundreds of passengers nonstop across continents and oceans in just a few hours.

Today you can read plenty of "gee whiz" stories about personal fabbing, plastic electronics, rapid 3D prototyping, stereolithography, and other precursors of molecular manufacturing (MM). It's much like people raving about biplane technology in the 1920's -- great stuff, but nothing compared to what's coming soon.

Between microscale fabbing and MM, there are at least three huge (OK, nanosize) differences: scaling, precision, and exponential production.

Scaling means that reduction in size of operating features by orders of magnitude (from micro to nano) results in both substantially decreased mass and significantly higher relative throughput -- basically, more bang for the buck.

Precision means machines that operate with no "wear and tear" in the ordinary sense. More important, it also means that useful features, including information processing (i.e., supercomputing), can be reduced to remarkably small sizes -- basically, the proverbial Library of Congress inside a sugar cube.

Exponential production refers to a manufacturing system that can produce more manufacturing systems: factories building factories. MM could enable anyone with a desktop-size nanofactory, for example, to build another one like it in less than a day. If you do the math, you can see that many millions of nanofactories could be produced in just a few months -- basically, all bets are off. The societal, environmental, economic, military, security, and geopolitical implications are immense.

That's why we need to pay attention. Progress in flight did not end with the biplane, and current trends toward increased miniaturization, precision, production throughput, and information processing power will not stop before molecular manufacturing is achieved -- which is coming sooner than almost everyone expects.

Mike Treder

Comments

[Tom Craver]

The bi-plane was enabled by the internal combustion engine, which was enabled by the Bessemer steel process developed in 1856, though not until 1875 was the process made suitable for mass production. So 10-30 years passed until the gasoline engine was developed (Daimler,1885), getting enough power in a small enough engine to enable powered fight about 20 years after that (Wrights, Kittyhawk, 1903). From Kittyhawk to passenger airlines was about another 25 years, though of course military applications came sooner.

While we don't know the sequence of critical developments for MNT, it seems likely that the AFM (1986, though the first scanning microscope came in 1971) may be considered first in the sequence, if only for demonstrating the precision manipulation of atoms. From that, historically one would expect the next step to take 10-30 years, arriving sometime between 1996 and 2016.

There's a fair amount of work being done on instrumenting AFM tips, so developing the ability to precisely position and bond one atom at a time seems a possible next historic step, enabling slowly building up precision nano-structures. At a guess, that could come within the next 5 years. Call it 2010 - about 25 years from the AFM - historically right on schedule.

From there to the "MNT Kittyhawk" - the first nano-scale assembler able to produce good copies of its own major components - might take another 10-30 years, if we take history as a guide - call it 2030, assuming there's no other key step in between. Maybe a Nanhattan project could pull that in as early as 2015, and possibly some limiting factors would push out widespread availability of nanofactories another 10-30 years.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Individual silicon atoms were pick-and-placed by STM under automated control (with monitoring/feedback) in 1994 by the Aono group. They could apparently only make 2D structures, but they did make those.
http://www.jst.go.jp/erato/project/agsh_P/agsh_P.html

More recently, Oyabu has used AFM (pure mechanical manipulation) to pick up and replace silicon atoms. And of course a lot of other molecules and structures have been built.

Although Freitas favors direct SPM mechanosynthetic fabrication, there are other approaches as well. We've just recently proposed another, using molecular building blocks positioned by SPM: http://wise-nano.org/w/Doing_MM

If MM continues to be done by hobbyists in defiance of scientific authority, then 2030 is a reasonable estimate for a Kittyhawk. If MM is accepted and a Nanhattan Project is launched... lessee... fission was demonstrated in 1938, chain reaction in 1942, and the first explosion in 1945. And it was only 10 years from Sputnik to moon landing.

MM is now in the process of being accepted.

Chris

[~MysticMonkeyGuru~]

Molecular nanotech is coming...in 100 years!